10/2442. Intruder in the Dust (1949)
Before there was To Kill a Mockingbird.... Actually, it's kind of surprising how much the two stories cover the same ground. Mockingbird does it with more style and grace, but Intruder, rough as it is around the edges, doesn't pull any punches. Good movie.

11/2443. Murder! (1930)
Does anyone ever talk about the worst Hitchcock films? Ok, so it's better than Marnie (and maybe The Trouble with Harry), and, yeah, sure, it's got some clever scenes, but overall I found it terribly, terribly boring with some of the worst written and delivered dialog. (How much of that is due to it being an early talkie?) Yawn.

12/2444. 3 Women (1977)
If there's anything worse than hearing someone describe their dream, it's watching a movie of it. In this case, the dreamer was Robert Altman, and he has filled it with enough "symbols" that he hopes your over-evolved monkey brain will have a field day trying to decipher as opposed to, you know, actually having a narrative or plot or meaning. For example, one of the women obsessed with superficial commercial things has a yellow car (and yes, the importance of the color is called out in the dialogue) and late in the film takes a delivery of Coca-Cola from this truck:

Is this somehow significant? You tell me. And then tell me how you feel about your mother.

13/2445. The Kid (1921)
Maybe I've been selling Charlie Chaplin short all these years. The Kid is actually pretty good cinema, even it if does jerk the tears a little too hard for my tastes in the third act that has a "comedy" dream sequence for no other apparent reason than the main story was just too short. (Obviously, I'm not willing to bury all my hatchets with the Little Tramp.)

14/2446. Appointment with Death (1988)
Watched with Mom. We had both read this Agatha Christie novel and remembered how the murder was committed (the movie certainly isn't shy about telegraphing it) but not the guilty party. It's not one of Christie's best, but any time spent watching Lauren Bacall is time well spent.

More to come.

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